WE ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACCUMULATION OF PLASTIC WASTE IN THE WORLD!
WE use it, many just throw it away. That is plastic container and bag products I’m talking about. Manufacturers manufacture it it, consumer product manufacturers put their products in it, and it goes out into the marketplaces of the whole world and WE buy it. Then, too many people carelessly dispose of it. Problem is it doesn’t go away! It is gathered and collected everywhere as it blows over the land, flows into our streams and rivers then into the oceans and out into the larger world.
The results of OUR using plastic packaging products can be seen everywhere- stuck to farm wire fences that the wind has carried off. We find it in our parks, in our schoolyards on our streets and in our waterways!
Fish, Whales , Albatrosses , Sea Turtles, Seals and many other living things either ingest it or are trapped by it; in any event it often times (not rarely) leads to death of some living thing. It travels out of our waterways and into the currents of the world’s oceans there to be gathered and spun around over and over again into huge collections of TRASH, floating in ever larger pools in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Plastic pollution is so prolifically found on many East African beaches that local impoverished women collect the more valuable of it for re-selling to re-manucturers. Beaches everywhere can be collecting points in any of the world’s oceans. On some small oceanic islands plastic garbage is becoming the main feature.
Most politicians are not concerned about it. Some are but think there is not much that can be done about it. There are a few that care but not enough of them willing to stand up and fight this deadly problem.
In third world countries where plastic bags are used the people there are often most concerned about surviving that day and are not much disposed to concern themselves as to where the plastic throw-aways go.
And to think that it was not too many decades ago that plastic products in all its many manifestations were introduced into a willing world, and little by little it has come to the point where we are today! Second only, but barely, to climate change as a major world threat, plastic pollution is dramatically changing our world, and is threatening it. It’s turning our environment into something very ugly, it is killing fish and birds and whales which unknowingly feed on the oceans now often deadly resources.
There are so many waterways totally plugged up with floating and semi-submersed plastic debris in some third world countries that an unsuspecting traveler would be absolutely shocked to consider that this was even possible. First world countries are not exempt either as most industrial economies have been abusing our waterfronts and waterways in so any ways for hundreds of years dumping all kinds of crap into them even setting the rivers on fire, and are still unabashedly doing so.
Somebody one day thought putting toothpaste in plastic was a good idea.
WE NEED TO PRESSURE OUR GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES, CONSUMERS GOODS MANUFACTURERS AND PACKAGING PRODUCERS to get much more creative about packaging and get very much more interested in the current world situation in this regard.
Lets start by passing legislation in every country requiring a refundable deposit on plastic containers, bottles and bags. Sounds like a big order. YES, it surely is, but it it is doable if the worlds’ people decide they want a change…
…LETS HELP THEM DECIDE!
TM
